End Gaining
Alexander Technique: Witnessing Our Life
Saturday April 10, 2010 • Filed in: Alexander Technique | Writing
small falls where the bears play. iphone photo: frank m sheldon
From an email1 to someone knowledgeable about the Alexander Technique, I wrote:
“If we notice without reacting—what I sometimes call ‘witnessing—things will eventually shift to more ease and balance on their own. Direction can be an essential part of that, but only as long as it is not turned into an imposition. To me, this is completely different from the good advice of not trying to correct based on (possibly) faulty kinesthetic perception. Instead, by noticing, we are giving the nervous system information it needs to readjust by itself. I don't believe that is End Gaining.”
A little more about some of these Alexander concepts as I understand them…
Our habits want to dominate everything we do. They are like an overly helpful person. When we try to practice the principles of the Alexander Technique, our habits will attempt to steal our practice and replacing it with a changeling of their own, that is, a counterfeit version of the Alexander Technique. Our good intentions are hijacked! The way to escape this deception is by having a clear sense of Alexander’s principle of Inhibition or “leaving yourself alone” as being primary. However, while leaving ourselves alone is indeed the essence of the Alexander Technique, that does not mean we should lock ourselves up in a small room fabricated from a limited understanding of this vital concept. We all wish shelter from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” but we will never find it in a fixed abode.
1 slightly edited for clarity
2 “Witness” is derived from the Old English of “wit” meaning “the seat of consciousness.”
Alexander Technique: End-Gaining
Friday April 23, 2010 • Filed in: Alexander Technique
In answer to a question, I wrote the paragraph below. It focuses on some of the consequences of what F. M. Alexander called “end-gaining,” which means to investing so much of ourselves in getting something that our struggles to have it at all costs get in the way. The result, sadly ironic, is that we end up not getting what we want. What I wrote refers to performance, although life is indeed a stage, and we are all players on it:
If we are focusing exclusively on where we believe we need to go, we will not only miss how we are getting there, but how we are going about getting there. And that means all our performances, great and small, will become mere reenactments of how we have always done things. For some, this means their performance becomes stale. For others, it means their performance lacks the required quality and is thus little valued. If there was ever any joy in the performance, all of it will have drained away. Amazingly, our tendency is to keep on reenacting our well known moves even if they never get us to the place we wish to be.
Of course, “how we are going about getting there,” refers to the “means-whereby,” the concept in the Alexander Technique that holds how we are, and thus, how we act as primary. This doesn’t require that we give up our aims and goals. It means that how we are when we go about doing what we do is of primary important because this will ultimately have a great influence on not only achieving our aims and goals, but the quality of those realizations as well as their consequences, direct and peripheral, good or bad.
iphone photo: frank m sheldon. mossy shoes, april. 2010
If we are focusing exclusively on where we believe we need to go, we will not only miss how we are getting there, but how we are going about getting there. And that means all our performances, great and small, will become mere reenactments of how we have always done things. For some, this means their performance becomes stale. For others, it means their performance lacks the required quality and is thus little valued. If there was ever any joy in the performance, all of it will have drained away. Amazingly, our tendency is to keep on reenacting our well known moves even if they never get us to the place we wish to be.
Of course, “how we are going about getting there,” refers to the “means-whereby,” the concept in the Alexander Technique that holds how we are, and thus, how we act as primary. This doesn’t require that we give up our aims and goals. It means that how we are when we go about doing what we do is of primary important because this will ultimately have a great influence on not only achieving our aims and goals, but the quality of those realizations as well as their consequences, direct and peripheral, good or bad.
iphone photo: frank m sheldon. mossy shoes, april. 2010